Downloading any of the add-ins from the site now gets you an installer for the Bellekens EA Toolpack. With this installer you can install all three add-ins, or only the ones you require.

The main reason for this change is the shared EA Addin Framework. Because all three add-ins use the same framework, there was a risk at version conflicts when two add-ins were installed on the same machine because each add-in installed its own version of the framework. With the new installer the framework gets installed only once thus avoiding any possible version conflicts which are known as the DLL Hell.

An added benefit of the Bellekens EA Toolpack is the fact that is now installs the applications for all users on the machine, making it easier to distribute in a corporate organisation.

Because the Bellekens EA Toolpack is a different application from Windows point of view you’ll have to uninstall any versions of EA Navigator, EA-Matic or ECDM Message Composer you might have installed previously. Uninstalling is the easiest from the add/remove programs feature in the control panel.

I already had the chance to try out this tool for a couple of weeks before it was released, and I must say, its a great help when developing add-ins.

What I like most about it is the fact that you can inspect any object directly from EA without having to into your IDE. Simply right-click and choose Element Details, and you get a window with ALL properties of the object you have selected, also the ones that are not exposed in the GUI of EA.